There’s lots of discussion here about whether some of what Clanchy describes is predatory at worst or ill-judged at best.
There are always things to learn, or reflect upon, and I don’t disagree that Clanchy responded very poorly to that initial Good Reads review, and how it challenged some of her positions and attitudes.
But, Some Kids... is not a textbook. It’s a memoir. And what her memoir was, was honest. And that’s what memoirs are for, surely? Some parts are pretty uncomfortable to read, yes. We want our teachers to be non-judgemental, compassionate, without bias. But the reality is that of course they are not. I think this idea that she’s somehow a bad teacher (or sexualising children, or writing thinly veiled pornography) is not grasping that Clanchy is depicting her responses; her self-examination of her responses; and then her actions. And it’s these second two that really matter.
I have taught in large inner-city comprehensives for twenty years, and I’ve taught many girls like Kristell in Clanchy’s book, often ones who have experienced some degree of abuse or neglect, who present themselves in sexually precocious ways. And because I am a human being doing a very complicated job, I’ll likely have lots of initial responses about this:
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Annoyance (why is she making life difficult for herself, me, and her classmates by preening in the mirror, flashing her legs at the boys near her, and refusing to get on with the work?)
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Concern (What’s going on here? This sexually precocious dress and behaviour is new – has something happened?
The way she’s presenting herself is going to attract predatory older males and she’s really vulnerable)
- Aesthetic distaste (it’s such a horrible look on a young girl, she looked so much nicer before all this).
Some of these thoughts are classist and rooted in sexism. They are not desirable, or positive thoughts to have about a pupil. But they are there, because I am a flawed human. I am also experienced and I am trained to recognise that these are not desirable or positive, and can examine them and remind myself that most of these thoughts are not fair. Other teachers will have different thoughts maybe, ones that reflect their own particular set of biases and preconceptions, but none will honestly initially react with wholly positive feelings of concern and care.
But then, mostly, hopefully, we do the right thing by that child. We teach them well, we adjust our content, resources and delivery to try to reach them; depending on our relationship with them we may try to talk with them to see if we can support them with what’s bothering them; we go to their Head of Year and talk to them about our concerns; we email their form tutor to ask them if they can do a round robin to see if there are similar concerns from other teachers; we fill out a safeguarding report; we worry about them.
For Kristell, the composite girl in the book, whose description has discomfited many posters, Clanchy does much more than this. She nurtures her creatively, she provides her with a space to articulate and process her own trauma. This is from the book:
“ Now Kristell sits with Tia and writes about assault and rape and arm-slashing and helplessness. She was right to tell me that the boys’ attention was a form of hate; it was, and so was my attitude to her, so was the attitude of our entire society, the attitude that identifies the disruption as coming from the young girl, not the gazing man, that attributes power to such a powerless person.”
Clanchy does not seem to me to be a bad teacher, far from it. She seems reflective, proactive and transformative. She explicitly acknowledges that her own initial responses to Kristell were unfair, sexist, sexualising. She’s learning from that. And she’s doing something fantastic educationally and personally for that child as a result.